like come ON

Brutal. Once one becomes an equity holder is something morally repugnant, they’re on the slippery slope of self-justification to functional evil.

When the child slaves are making the nails that are keeping you out of debtors' prison, you're also going to start dabbling in some pretty esoteric concepts of justice. It's also funny how this just reads like every Hobbsean argument about the criminal and the state.

The Haitian revolution fried a lot of American brains

Pretty sure this is the logic behind a lot of "liberal" zionists.

“We would free these slaves but then we’d all have to get jobs”

What book is this?

He would have loved twitter.com

It gets really grim when you learn about Sally Hemmings…

Jefferson like his peers was an uncommon model of a coward in excess (he was smart enough to know better) - and he and his peers passed that bit of their character on to generations. Much of their living posteriority has no idea how deeply fear informs the irrationality of their bigotry.

Just sell the fucking plantation, you can more easily be a gentleman scientist in Philly

Yeah I mean he knew. Everything else is a scramble to make it fit together

Makes me wonder if he would've been an annoying contrarian if he'd been around today

Probably so, like so many opining ‘conservative’ commentators who qualify institutionalized violence as reasonable means to force others to assimilate social ideals, to accept what they consider indispensable ‘values’, all which favor their respective world views - ie, debate as pretext.